Between 2022 and 2023, labor union and strike activity on college campuses increased to represent over 35,000 new workers, with many of these workers being graduate students (Herbert, 2023). As strike activity has continued into 2024 and beyond, it is necessary to understand how institutions responded to strikes to consider how their response may…

Trade union collaboration on issues of social justice connects workers to each other and to their wider communities and is therefore considered a strategy of union renewal. Prior to their amalgamation on 1 January 2023, Lärarförbundet (Swedish Teachers' Union) and Lärarnas Riksförbund (National Union of Teachers in Sweden) collaborated…

We study the effects of the unionization of faculty at Canadian universities from 1970-2022 using an event-study design. Using administrative data which covers the full universe of faculty salaries, we find strong evidence that unionization leads to both average salary gains and compression of the distribution of salaries. Our estimates indicate…

Public service reforms often provoke political backlash. Can they also yield political benefits for the politicians who champion them? We study a Wisconsin law that weakened teachers' unions and liberalized pay, prompting mass protests. Exploiting its staggered implementation across school districts, we find that the reform cut union revenues,…

The article investigates the Estrado Network, which has united academics, trade unionists, and teachers in resistance against neoliberal globalisation while fostering educational alternatives for over twenty years. We utilise Bhabha's 'third space' concept to examine the network's role in the 'hybridization of various discourses and perspectives.…

Amid the global neoliberal assault on public education, teachers and their unions are called upon to resist detrimental educational reforms. Employing photo-elicitation focus groups, this paper explored ten Saskatchewan teacher activists' perceptions of their political resistance to neoliberalism both within their union and beyond. Utilizing a…

After George Floyd was murdered by police, teachers, alongside the leaders of their unions and professional associations, confronted urgent calls to address racism in their communities, schools, and classrooms, just as they were concluding an academic year rendered chaotic by COVID-19. This article leverages four waves of semistructured interviews…

In 2019, Poland experienced a massive teachers' strike that lasted three weeks. Although the strike had a great impact on many teachers, in the end, this three-week action failed to obtain any of its demands. Using the concepts of workers' associational power and union legitimacy, I argue that one of the reasons for the loss was a crisis of…

Between 2011 and 2015, at the dawn of the global financial crisis, Spain went through severe austerity measures that led to social unrest and to the emergence of new expressions of collective action. In the educational field, teachers' unions and grassroots movements organised against the neoliberal and neoconservative policies promoted by the…

In light of growing difficulties for schools to attract teachers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and the continued discussions surrounding the unionization of education, this paper examines the effect of collective bargaining (CB) laws on the salary of teachers with a STEM degree. To isolate the effect of…

Although charter schools are frequently afforded flexibility from many state laws that govern traditional public schools, a growing number of charter school teachers have now unionized and introduced collective bargaining to the charter sector. Using data from a detailed content analysis of teacher CBAs from California, we compare the…

This article critically analyses the dynamic role of the Preschool Teachers' Union in Iceland, tracing its strategic moves within the educational and political spheres from inception to the present. The union's formative years were marked by a fight to become a fully fledged union and active participation in foundational negotiations that…

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic prompted changes to the terms and conditions of teachers' employment (e.g. working conditions), leading school districts to renegotiate collective bargaining agreements with teachers' unions. However, limited research has examined how these negotiations occur in times of crisis. This study aims to analyze how school…

Teacher unions are working in challenging times. Building power is important for teacher unions to resist neoliberal reforms that have aimed to restructure school education and weaken collective organisation. Yet we have few understandings of the democratisation project that teacher unions have engaged in to build and renew internal power in this…

This paper explores the experience of three mentors working with a group of 12 practitioner action researchers; practitioners who were recipients of an Action Research Grant (ARG) in a programme initiated and managed by the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS). The EIS is a trade union, which represents over 80% of Scotland's teaching…